LITMIR.BIZ

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His voice was weak but quite clear. “I need to be able to think carefully. They may be coming for me. You had best leave this house.”

      Jehane hadn’t thought of that. He was right, of course. There was no particular reason why Almalik’s murderous desert mercenaries would allow an accident of ill-health to deprive them of Husari’s head. And as for the doctor—the Kindath doctor—who had so inconveniently kept him from the palace …

      She shrugged. Whichever way the wind blows, it will rain upon the Kindath. Her gaze met Husari’s. There was something terrible in his face, still growing, a horror taking shape and a name. Jehane wondered how she must look herself, weary and bedraggled after most of a day in this warm, close room, and now dealing with what they had learned. With slaughter.

      “It doesn’t matter whether I stay or go,” she said, surprised again at how calmly she said this. “Ibn Khairan knows who I am, remember? He brought me here.”

      Oddly, a part of her still wanted to deny that it was Ammar ibn Khairan who had arranged and achieved this wholesale massacre of innocent men. She couldn’t have said why that had any importance to her: he was a killer, the whole of Al-Rassan knew he was. Did it matter that a killer was sophisticated and amusing? That he had known who her father was, and had spoken well of him?

      Behind her, Velaz offered the small, discreet cough that meant he had something urgent to say. Usually in disagreement with a view she had expressed. Without looking back at him, Jehane said, “I know. You think we should leave.”

      In his subdued tones, her grey-haired servant—her father’s before her—murmured, “I believe the most honorable ibn Musa offers wise counsel, doctor. The Muwardis may learn who you are from ibn Khairan, but there is no great reason for them to pursue you. If they come for the lord ibn Musa, though, and find us here, you are a provocation to them. My lord ibn Musa will tell you the same thing, I am sure of it. They are desert tribesmen, my lady. They are not … civilized.”

      And now Jehane did wheel around, aware that she was channelling fear and anger onto her truest friend in the world, aware that this was not the first time. “So you would have me abandon a patient?” she snapped. “Is that what I should do? How very civilized of us.”

      “I am recovering, Jehane.”

      She turned back to Husari. He had pushed himself up to a sitting position. “You did all a physician could be asked to do. You saved my life, though not in the way we expected.” Amazingly, he managed a wry smile. It did not reach his eyes.

      His voice was firmer now, sharper than she could ever remember. She wondered if some disordered state had descended upon the merchant in the wake of overwhelming horror; if this altered manner was his way of reacting. Her father would have been able to tell her.

      Her father, she thought, would not tell her anything again.

      There was a good chance the Muwardis would be coming for Husari, that they might indeed take her if they found her here. The tribesmen from the Majriti were not civilized at all. Ammar ibn Khairan knew exactly who she was. Almalik of Cartada had ordered this butchery. Almalik of Cartada had also done what he had done to her father. Four years ago.

      There are moments in some lives when it can truly be said that everything pivots and changes, when the branching paths show clearly, when one makes a choice.

      Jehane bet Ishak turned back to her patient. “I’m not leaving you here to wait for them alone.”

      Husari actually smiled again. “What will you do, my dear? Offer sleeping draughts to the veiled ones when they come?”

      “I have worse than that to give them,” Jehane said darkly, but his words forced her to pause. “What do you want,” she asked him. “I am running too fast, I’m sorry. It is possible they are sated. No one may come.”

      He shook his head decisively. Again, she registered the change in manner. She had known ibn Musa for a long time. She had never seen him like this.

      He said, “I suppose that is possible. I don’t greatly care. I don’t intend to wait to find out. If I am going to do what I must do, I will have to leave Fezana, in any case.”

      Jehane blinked. “And what is it you must do?”

      “Destroy Cartada,” said the plump, lazy, self-indulgent silk merchant, Husari ibn Musa.

      Jehane stared at him. This was a man who liked his dinner meat turned well, so he need not see blood when he ate. His voice was as calm and matter-of-fact as it was when she had heard him talking with a factor about insuring a shipment of silk for transport overseas.

      Jehane heard Velaz offer his apologetic cough again. She turned. “If that is so,” Velaz said, as softly as before, his forehead creased with worry now, “we cannot be of aid. Surely it will be better if we are gone from here … so the lord ibn Musa can begin to make his arrangements.”

      “I agree,” Husari said. “I will call for an escort and—”

      “I do not agree,” Jehane said bluntly. “For one thing, you are at risk of fever after the stones pass and I have to watch for that. For another, you will not be able to leave the city until dark, and certainly not by any of the gates.”

      Husari laced his pudgy fingers together. His eyes held hers now, the gaze steady. “What are you proposing?”

      It seemed obvious to Jehane. “That you hide in the Kindath Quarter with us until nightfall. I’ll go first, to arrange for them to let you in. I’ll be back at sundown for you. You ought to be in some disguise, I think. I’ll leave that to you. After dark we can leave Fezana by a way that I know.”

      Velaz, pushed beyond discretion, made a strangled sound behind her.

      “We?” said ibn Musa carefully.

      “If I am going to do what I must do,” said Jehane deliberately, “I, too, will have to leave Fezana.”

      “Ah,” said the man in the bed. He gazed at her for a disquieting moment, no longer a patient, in some unexpected way. No longer the man she had known for so long. “This is for your father?”

      Jehane nodded. There was no point dissembling. He had always been clever.

      “Past time,” she said.

      THERE WAS A GREAT DEAL to be done. Jehane realized, walking quickly through the tumult of the streets with Velaz, that it was only the mention of her father that had induced Husari to accept her plan. That wasn’t a surprising thing, if one looked at the matter in a certain light. If there was anything the Asharites understood, after centuries of killing each other in their homelands far to the east, and here in Al-Rassan, it was the enduring power of a blood feud, however long vengeance might be deferred.

      No matter how absurd it might appear—a Kindath woman declaring her intention of taking revenge against the most powerful monarch to emerge since the Khalifate fell—she had spoken a language even a placid, innocuous Asharite merchant could understand.

      And, in any case, the merchant was not so placid any more.

      Velaz, seizing the ancient prerogative of longtime servants, was blistering her ears with objections and admonitions. His voice was, as always, appreciably less deferential than it was when others were with them. She could remember him doing this to her father as well, on nights when Ishak would be preparing to rush outside to a patient’s summons without properly clothing himself against rain or wind, or without finishing his meal, or when he drove himself too hard, reading late into the night by candlelight.

      She was doing a little bit more than staying up too late, and the frightened concern in Velaz’s voice was going to erode her confidence if she let him go on. Besides which, she had a more difficult confrontation waiting at home.

      “This has nothing to do with us,” Velaz was saying urgently, in step with her and not behind, which was completely uncharacteristic, the surest sign of his agitation. “Except if they find a way to blame the Kindath for it, which I wouldn’t be surprised

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